Unscripted - A Blog for Actors - Backstage

Quotations: Volume 1

On my grad school blog, I often post quotations that I write down in my notebooks during my classes. Some are funny, some are inspirational, some are educational, and all are most definitely worth remembering. I thought I'd take a variation on that theme for Unscripted; instead of writing quotations I overhear in life, I'd start sharing quotations about acting (and things that I think apply to acting... and life) that I've gotten from various sources (including many that have been shared with me via the internet). Here's the first batch. Enjoy!

"When your art is your civil service, there is no boring exercise." ~ Andrei Malaev-Babel

Let's All Breathe

A few weeks ago, a favorite blogger of mine posted about the Universal Breathing Room. I love it, and I highly recommend checking it out.

Basically, you go to the website, and it guides you on when to breathe in and out, as a sort of meditation. And it syncs you up with all the other people around the world who are on the site at the same time as you (not that you ever have any proof of that, but isn't it a lovely idea to think that you're a small part of a whole?).

Passion Yields Energy

I'm on "break" at the moment, although my breaks never really feel like breaks. I'm visiting my family while I have the rare opportunity to leave school, and I've been working at the same job I worked at this summer.

I'm a dedicated person, regardless of what I'm working on. And right now, I am worn out. It's funny; during the school year, especially when I'm working on a show, my life is way more complicated than it is right now. I'm a lot busier, I have far longer of hours, the work I'm doing is more physical... But at the end of my school days, I often have more energy left in me than I have after eight hours of working retail.

Playing Something Me-ish

Tonight I did a reading of a new play, "Three for Tea" by Nick Tierce. I love doing new works, and I happen to know the playwright, which made it even more fun.

And I realized, the character I played in the reading is the closest I've come to playing "me" in a long time. Or at least, the way I interpreted the character was that I didn't really need to make any character adjustments... I just let her be like me. It was... nice.

At the Speed of Grad School

I can't believe that tomorrow is the last day of the semester. Everything seems to have gone by awfully quickly.

But really, I don't just mean the semester... All of grad school is just whooshing by. I'm nearly half-done with my 3-year program.

I feel like I'm in a period of my life where everything around me seems to be moving simultaneously sluggishly and at the speed of light. Maybe that's just generally a definition of being in your twenties. Or maybe it's not the speed of light at all; maybe I'm still adjusting to the speed of grad school.

Wearing Someone Else's Clothes

  When your income is a combination of an assistantship stipend and student loans, certain words begin to take on a whole new meaning: "Sale", "Discount", and "Clearance" come to mind. Paying full price for anything seems somehow ludicrous.

As a result, the lure of Black Friday, the weekend after, and this newfangled "Cyber Monday" (which seemed to pop into ubiquitous existence from the ether this year... When did that get coined? And am I the only one who thinks it sounds dirty?) seemed shinier this year than in times past. But, much to the benefit of my bank account, I avoided the post-Thanksgiving promotions.

But I did manage to get a whole new array of clothing added to my closet today, thanks to a clothing swap with some of the lovely ladies in my program.

The Show Is Never Over

Someone once said to me, "The show is never really over; we just stop performing it." That certainly seems true of The Mystery Plays. (Note: the photo is of me in the dressing room wearing one of my costumes from the show.)

So all the time I thought I was going to have when the play was over hasn't really existed. Things keep popping into my schedule, filling it in a delightful and unexpected way.

One of the coolest things I did last week was go to a neighboring college to discuss The Mystery Plays with a Literature class that focuses on theatrical texts. They read the play, and then came to see our performance of it.

It was fun to talk about the show with people who had read it. It was completely different from our usual talk-backs after performances. We talked about how we approach the show as actors, as opposed to how they approached it as readers. I loved it. I hope they did, too.

Post-Show Malaise

The Mystery Plays closed on Sunday. My parents flew down to see it closing weekend, which was awesome (they hadn't seen me act in a long while). The final performance went very well (as did the whole run, actually). And now that it's over... Well, it's bittersweet. It's nice to have a little more time in my week, and less pressure. But I already miss it. I loved this show. And I loved getting a chance to act on stage again.

To be honest, without the show, I'm not sure what to do with myself.

Things I Will Do When the Show Is Over

- Paint my nails with Ocean Love Potion nail polish (I can't paint them anything other than nude colors for the characters I'm playing now)

- Catch up on my laundry.

- Continue to make connections from my daily life to lines and situations from the show.

- Sew the strap back onto the red dress that I wanted to wear a couple of weeks ago, but couldn't because the strap had come unstitched.

The Hair Battle

My hair complicates my life in a surprising number of ways. It's naturally somewhere between curly and straight, and I spent many years fighting with it and trying to make it one or the other (like in this photo, during the phase when I was pretending it was curly, or the one below when I was in a straightening phase). In grad school, I usually don't have the time/will/energy/sense to care what my hair is doing most days.

Part of the hair battle that's been toughest for me is where the Actor part of me kicks in. Must not do anything drastic. Must look like head-shot. Must appear cast-able.

I always WANT to experiment with my hair, but being an actor makes me afraid to touch it. At one point I wrote "Willing to drastically alter hair" on my résumé, with the hope that a show might give me the excuse I'd been looking for to do something crazy with it. But aside from one director who let me have "raven hair" when I played Diana Barry in Anne of Green Gables, most productions beg me to NOT change my hair. So it stayed long and brown for a very, very long time.